Reconsidering the Hungarian revolution of 1956

The fortieth anniversary of the Hungarian uprising of October‐November 1956 came fortuitously several years after the collapse of the communist system in Hungary and the Soviet Union, following which archives in both countries have been opened to scholarly scrutiny. These changes have permitted scholars ‐ and the public at large ‐to identify those events as a revolution, and to examine and document it in ways that were hitherto forbidden. The nature of that revolution has been and continues to be explored and debated, and the debate feeds into the present attempts to redefine the nation's place in post‐communist Europe: various groups have attempted to claim 1956 as their own. Both the scholarly and the political debates are likely to continue.